Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is in Vancouver to promote his new book — You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes — will always be remembered for the way he inspired people through chronicling life aboard the International Space Station.

The book is a compilation of 150 of the best photographs Hadfield took during his five-month mission aboard the space station that ended in May 2013.

The photos, picked from a total of 45,000 taken while circling the world, are meant to illuminate the history and consequences of human settlement, the magnificence of landscapes and the power of natural forces shaping Planet Earth.

On Thursday, Hadfield sat down with The Vancouver Sun and answered a few questions about his book, a new television sitcom based on his life, and the future.

Q How’s the new book doing?

A It’s the No. 1 book in Canada this past week, which is delightful. I realized I’d taken about 45,000 pictures and I hadn’t seen most of them and no one else had. Do I just let them languish? My wife and I thought we’d just go through them and take out the best ... and try to make one turn of the Earth and let people see for themselves what the Earth really looks like. I don’t want to tell people what to think about the world. Instead, just describe it.

Q Have you been a photographer your whole life?

A My parents bought me a camera when I was a kid, 10 years old or so, and I’ve been a photographer my whole life and, hopefully, I got slowly and slowly better at it.

Q Your new book contains many stunning photographs. Which one or ones stand out for you?

A These 150 are the ones that stand out for me. They are absolutely my best effort to describe the entire world in 92 minutes.

Q What meaning or impact do you hope these images convey?

A It’s really easy to start drawing conclusions about the world based on third-hand information, being told what to think by other people’s impression. And I’m always wary of that. I was in a rare position to actually see the world directly. Only a handful of Canadians have actually seen the world that way. Why not just capture that to the best of my ability and then just pass it directly, unfiltered to other people so they can draw their own conclusions? It’s up to you to decide what that means to you and how it might affect your thinking.

Q How difficult is it to take photographs from space?

A It’s constantly changing, the angle between you and the sun and the Earth, the lighting, the season. It’s perpetually changing. I was trained by professional photographers for 20 years. I’m an Imax cameraman and helped make two Imax movies. Now it’s mostly digital cameras. Fortunately, with digital you can make a lot of mistakes and still get a few good pictures.

Q Work has also begun on the pilot for a TV sitcom based on your first book: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. How on Earth — excuse the word — did that happen?

A People say my memoir is being made into a sitcom, but I didn’t write a memoir so that just cracks me up. My first book was very much about useful lessons that people could use and it never occurred to me that someone would make it into a movie or a TV show. But Warner Brothers saw this contrast between the complexity of the life of an astronaut and how that must work when you come home, which is in the book to some degree as well. They thought there’s a lot of meat there. So they approached us and ABC is making a sitcom based on it and it will be on TV in the fall. It’s kinda fun and we’ll see what comes of it.

Q Who’s playing your part? Better yet, who would you like to play your part?

A I’m not the guy to ask. I have no idea and I wouldn’t make any suggestions. My wife has some pretty strong opinions, but she’s keeping it to herself. It’s also about 15 years ago in my astronaut career when I was in my first space flight and I was about 35 or 40, so it will have to be somebody hopefully that age. It’s gotta be somebody who can grow a good moustache, but otherwise I don’t know.

Q Two years ago, you piloted the Russian Soyuz and joined the International Space Station, where you chronicled your life on board and took thousands of pictures. And in 1995, you visited the Russian space station Mir. Any thoughts on how today’s political climate might change that level of cooperation?

A I was the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm and the purpose of our flight was to help build Mir. Mir means “peace” and “the world.”

I lived many years in Russia and was NASA’s director of operations in Russia. I learned how to speak Russian so I could train, simulate and eventually fly the Soyuz as a pilot.

It’s not like we had a perfect political climate in 1995. And the (countries that) built the International Space Station were Japan, the U.S., Germany and Russia and Canada and most of the countries of Europe. We are not perpetual peaceful allies. In fact, within living memory of my parents almost all of us have been enemies and killing each other because of our different ideologies. It’s never been easy. But it stands as a terrific symbol, I think, for the whole world of what we can do together in amongst the regular battles, squabbles, territorial concerns and individual agendas that the world always has. There are six people in the space station right now from countries all over the world that are running 200 experiments on behalf of universities and businesses right around the planet. So that’s a terrific example when we really need a good symbol.

In 1988 I was a fighter pilot intercepting soviet bombers off the coast of Canada that were fully armed and practicing cruise missile launches. That’s what I did for a living in the mid-’80s and by 1995 I was helping build a Russian space station cooperatively with an American space shuttle, a Canadian (Canadarm), an international crew. It was an amazing transition, but it sure wasn’t any guarantee or easy thing.

Q I know you’re retired, but do you have any desire to head back to space if circumstances changed?

A I’m one of the most qualified people in the country to fly in space. It’s what I’ve done almost all my adult life, so yes, I’d love the chance to do that again. But I’ve flown in space three times and I’ve had my share.

Nothing lasts forever. I’m a private citizen now.

Q Has life gone downhill since you returned to Earth?

A I never measured my life by individual peaks and valleys and to me that’s a really dangerous and self-defeating thing to do. If you define your life by one transient success, then what does that do to the rest of your life? I just never do it that way. It’s like a bucket list. What a terrible thing, a bucket list. By definition, it means you’re walking around almost your entire life with a partially empty bucket. What a millstone to hang around your own neck. Why not fill up your bucket every single day? To me, it’s a lifetime of richness and experience to this point, so now let’s do other things. Because people only notice what I was doing while I was in space, they think that must be how it was like for me, that I was doing nothing and then I was in space and now I’m doing nothing again. That’s completely erroneous.

Q Have you decided what you’re going to do next?

A There’s a whole suite of things. I teach at the University of Waterloo. I do a lot of stuff with younger students. I was in a high school yesterday with a thousand kids, did a thing with five thousand kids on the weekend across counties in Ontario.

I wrote a whole suite of music on the space station and performed with the Windsor Symphony (Orchestra) on the weekend, four sold-out shows. We’ll probably do that across the country. There will be more books eventually too. And lots of public speaking. I consult to the Canadian Space Agency and to aerospace industries. My brother and I made a song for Canada Day that’s been seen by millions of people. There’s just a whole variety of stuff. I’m 55.

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